John Dudley: Tall order awaits new Gannon women's hoops hire

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Gannon is set to name a women's basketball coach Monday morning.

Whoever gets the job could be stepping into a dream season. Or walking straight into a nightmare.

How else can you describe the gig? The upside is the Lady Knights, with nearly every key player back from last year's NCAA Atlantic Region championship team, could capture the first national title in program history a few blocks from campus.

The downside is they could end up playing harmless hosts. No one wants to work an Elite Eight when you could be winning one instead.

This is how it is when you inherit a program from Cleve Wright, who went 233-100 with five NCAA tournament appearances in 11 seasons at Gannon before leaving for Miami (Ohio) in April.

The new coach could win the NCAA title at Erie Insurance Arena next March, and some Gannon boosters will say it came with players Wright recruited and developed.

Or the Knights could come up short, and they'll say the new hire turned lemonade into lemons.

Thankless doesn't begin to describe it, but that's how it goes in the world of big-girl basketball the Knights lived in under Wright.

Wright's leaving was one thing Gannon didn't count on when it put in its bid to host. You could envision contingencies for, say, the Erie Insurance Arena roof collapsing beneath a signature lake-effect snowstorm on the eve of the tournament.

But the man who led Gannon to the brink of Mecca leaving just before crossing the border to the promised land?

That seemed fairly unlikely.

The best case for the new coach is everybody stays, the transition is a smooth one and the Knights end the regular season with the opportunity to play all the way to the national final without getting on a bus.

Worst case ... well, you can only imagine what could go wrong.

The unfair part of the deal is that in a season like this, with so many possibilities, people to tend forget how much has to go right for a team to even reach an Elite Eight, much less win one.

You have to stay healthy, first and foremost. You have to assume you're going to get everyone's best game every night and be OK with that, because you're wearing a big target like a bright red tattoo. And you have to get a few breaks, because not every bounce and not every call is going to go your way.

It would be easy to assume that all of those things would have happened had Wright stuck around.

The reality is that every title run is stacked, to a certain extent, on a little bit of fairy dust.